Short takes: Fiction

By MARGIE THOMSON

Douglas Kennedy: A Special Relationship

Hotshot foreign correspondent Sally Goodchild, based in Cairo, falls in love with fellow journalist Tony Hobbs. It's not long before she becomes pregnant, they marry and return to London, he to a prestigious job, she to signs that Tony is not quite the devoted partner she hoped. Following a debilitating pregnancy, Sally falls into the pit that is postnatal depression. She emerges to discover that Tony has scarpered with their child - his parting shot a court order declaring her an unfit mother and forbidding contact with the baby. Despite a slightly clunky opening, this is absolutely thrilling stuff - a very modern horror story. As the subsequent court case unfolds with its sordid exposure of skeletons in cupboards, we are forced to ask ourselves how we would fare, if our lives were put under such a spotlight.

(Hutchinson, $34.95)

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Barbara and Stephanie Keating: To My Daughter In France

When revered father Richard Kirwan dies, no one is prepared for the shock that lies in his will. "To my daughter in France, I bequeath the remainder of my Estate," he directed. His children are shocked - they knew nothing of their father's "other" life - but the following months of investigation slowly (this is a fat book) reveal a series of mysteries and secrets that lead back to World War II, the Gestapo, and Hitler's concentration camps. A passionate story that successfully weaves its several strands into a satisfying whole.

(Vintage, $26.95)

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Bella Bathurst: Special

A group of teenage girls, supervised by two teachers, spend a week together on a class trip. The result: an intense, brutalising experience - a kind of psychological Lord of the Flies, in which each girl's struggle for identity is fought in painful opposition to the others'. Teenage sex (so sordid and depressing it could make you cry), smoking, alcohol, anorexia - it's all here. Obviously, this is not a happy story, but it's awfully well told, horribly like being there, and Bathurst creates both the inner struggles and the cruel dialogues with almost unbearable verisimilitude.

(Picador, $27.95)

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Shane Watson: The One To Watch

A fusion of chick and hen lit, the Observer called this, meaning it's chick lit, but with some of its characters being - gasp! - around 40. Rock wife and society beauty Amber Best dies unexpectedly on the cusp of her fifth decade, and her friends agree to contribute to a documentary about her life - an uncovering of "the real Amber Best". Friendships unravel: no one knew each other, or Amber, as well as they had thought. I found the non-stop fashion-speak tedious rather than amusing (other reviewers found this highly entertaining), but the story clips along like a society dame in stilettos.

(Pan, $24.95)

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Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex

IF you haven't read this yet, rush out and buy this new edition of Eugenides' brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a girl who grows into a man. Warm, tragic, funny, her story takes us from 1920s Greece to Detroit's Greek immigrant community, encompassing a cast of memorable characters and a broad sweep of American social history along the way.

(Bloomsbury, $27.95)